[herval]

> how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller

you answered it yourself.

What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet? What if you base your self on something that's fringe at a global scale, but acceptable in your local culture? What if all your human interactions are on the internet (with millions of strangers that tend to treat you badly, because people are way more rude online than in real life) vs on your local community (where people treat you better simply to avoid getting punched in the nose, but you might think they like you)?

_Everything_ is different online (and that obviously impacts people's psychologies)

[rKarpinski]

> What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet?

>> When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours [...] One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating [...] Soon after, I stopped skating.

Seems like the author struggled with comparison before the internet, like the grandfather comment said.

[wpietri]

This is a great point.

In one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books, he talks about the emotional impact of looking at one's portfolio performance. If you do it rarely, like quarterly or annually, it'll generally be a positive experience. If you do it day by day, you'll have quite a lot of negative experiences. Because we're wired for loss aversion, we'll weight those negative experiences more highly. The same facts, presented differently, have very different impacts.

If I'm doing my own thing, like the author was with roller skating, my basis for comparison is me. There will be ups and downs, but more of the former, because we can't help but learn. But as you say, the bigger group I rank myself against, the more those experiences will be negative. I also think the bigger groups discourage camaraderie, because the declining chance of future interaction means smaller rewards for collaboration and support.